OUR 2018 - 2019 SEASON
The Power of Memory and Imagination
in Modern Times
Last season, Spooky Action's plays stepped behind the scenes to experience the magical reality that animates our lives. For our 2018-2019 season, we travel in time and space to rediscover the power of memory and imagination and reflect on current issues that permeate our daily lives—the refugee and immigrant crisis; the horrors of wars and primal instincts; and a family’s willingness to embrace a radical notion of what's best for their children.
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New Guidelines for Peaceful Times
October 11 - 28, 2018 written by Bosco Brasil directed by Roberta Alves A high-stakes confrontation between a troubled Brazilian immigration official and a WWII European refugee. We open our season with New Guidelines for Peaceful Times by Brazilian playwright Bosco Brasil. Written in 2001, performed around the world and adapted for the screen in 2009, the play will now have its US premier here at Spooky Action Theater. |
"I wrote New Guidelines inspired by the true experience of a very well-known director who fled to Brazil from Poland after WWII, because I was interested in finding out how somebody can leave everything behind and start over,” remembers Bosco Brasil. “But New Guidelines is not just about one man's struggle, it's about the struggle that all refugees and migrants experience nowadays.”
Brasil donates his royalties from the play's productions to AVSI Foundation, an international NGO that supports refugees and migrants around the world.
Brasil donates his royalties from the play's productions to AVSI Foundation, an international NGO that supports refugees and migrants around the world.
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Production team
Stage Manager - Brandon Raschad Butts Assistant Director - Vivian Allvin Set & Costume Design - Teca Fichinski Sound Design - David Crandall Movement Coach - David Gaines Props Design - Xemi Manibusan Tapepechul Lighting Design - Kyle Grant |
Cast
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Spooky Action proudly hosts the DC premiere of In This Hope: A Pericles Project. Written by dramaturg Hannah Hessel Ratner (Audience Enrichment Manager at the Shakespeare Theatre Company) and presented by The Welders, In This Hope: A Pericles Project is a multi-layered theatrical experience devised from Shakespeare’s Pericles, excavating the impact of storytelling and celebrating the power of memory. Join a journey that began in song over 800 years ago.
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Among the Dead
February 14 - March 10, 2019 written by Hansol Jung directed by Richard Henrich Three separate time periods collide in a small hotel room in Korea. Mediated by a shape-shifting Jesus who first shows up as a bellboy. Three characters have to come to terms with their stories. In the Winter, Spooky Action brings Among the Dead by Hansol Jung to DC for the first time. Described by The New York Times as “surreal, smart and stinging” with high notes of laugh-out-loud comedy. |
Ana is a Korean American who travels to Seoul in 1975 to retrieve her recently deceased father’s ashes. Luke is a young American soldier fighting in the jungles of Burma in 1944. Number Four is the name of a Korean comfort woman camping out on a bridge in Seoul in 1950, waiting for the return of the young American soldier who fathered her daughter.
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The Oldest Boy: A Play in Three Ceremonies
June 6 - 30, 2019 written by Sarah Ruhl directed by Kathryn Chase Bryer An American mother and a Tibetan father must make a life-altering choice that will test their strength, their marriage and their hearts. Two Tibetan monks seek their three-year-old son. The boy is the reincarnation of a revered Buddhist lama, and the monks propose to take the child away for a life of spiritual training in India. |
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“The Oldest Boy is a richly emotional journey filled with music, dance, puppetry, ritual and laughter — Sarah Ruhl at her imaginative best,” says Artistic Director Richard Henrich. “A meditation on attachment and unconditional love, the play shows us a world in which the youngest children are sometimes also the oldest and wisest teachers.”
"This season we offer three unique plays that plumb the power of memory and imagination. In each play, memory and imagination do not simply recall the past, they create it. Following the characters, we step beyond the present place and time to connect with a moment lost. And with that moment found, become eternally renewed."
–Artistic Director Richard Henrich
Spooky Action programming presented with support from
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Share Fund
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and the Julian R and Varue W Oishei Foundation
Our season is funded in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts